Thursday 29 October 2009 18.40 EDT
First published on Thursday 29 October 2009 18.40 EDT

Not all songs are about wild love and wide roads. Or perhaps they are, but they are also about the way that wild love can slip between the floorboards, or tangle around the plughole, the way it can grout our lives.

I've always had a liking for such domesticity in song. As a child I was faintly mesmerised by the lyrics to Carly Simon's Coming Around Again: "You pay the grocer/ Fix the toaster/ Kiss the host goodbye." Did grocers and toasters and souffles and sneezes really belong in a pop song, I wondered, in much the same way that I had long marvelled at the vaguely parochial escape of Paul Simon's Gus, leaving his lover by simply hopping on a bus. Later came the Smiths, with their 10-tonne trucks and double-decker buses, their Sheilas and Maries and their talk of "ice on the sink where we bathe". And then there was Belle & Sebastian, singing of Doris and Debenhams, lino and louvre doors, and the way the "first cup of coffee tastes like washing up". It was a kind of pop-music realism.

My favourite domestic song, and also my favourite Beatles song, has always been A Day in the Life. The closing track on 1967's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, its story is now well-documented. The verses belonged to Lennon, and it was claimed they were inspired by a series of news events – the "lucky man" of the first verse was apparently the Guinness heir Tara Browne, who had died in a car crash, while the film referenced in the second verse was Dick Lester's How I Won the War, in which Lennon himself had starred as Private Gripweed. The 4,000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire, hailed from an article published in the Daily Mail that January: "There are 4,000 holes in the road in Blackburn, Lancashire," it read, "one twenty-sixth of a hole per person, according to a council survey. If Blackburn is typical then there are over two million holes in Britain's roads and 300,000 in London." Each verse culminated in the same mystifying sentiment: "I'd love to turn you on."

Between verses two and three came an orchestral swell, the sound of 41 musicians playing each of their instruments from the very lowest note to the very highest. (It's always amazed me how Lennon managed to sound so alone, so isolated, surrounded by so many trombones and violins.)

And then, suddenly, an alarm clock rang, heralding McCartney's section, a reminiscence of a mundane weekday morning: the rising, the rush, the lateness, the comb across the head and the cup and the coat and the hat. The dash for the bus leads him upstairs to the top deck, where he smokes, and then, "Somebody spoke and I went into a dream … "

What I have long loved about this song is its mingling of private and public, the clutter of domestic details pushed up against the cold, crisp facts of the newspaper story. It seems to me to emphasise how the public account of a life, or of the potholes of Lancashire, or the end of the war, says very little about the private experience, about the quiet domestic routines we all have.

More than that, I love how between those humdrum details there runs a wildness: that "I'd love to turn you on", such an untamed, intimate sentiment; "Somebody spoke and I went into a dream," seeming to document that precise moment when public meets private, outer world meets inner. It is these final lines and their shared sense of fantasy that unites Lennon and McCartney's separate segments of the song.

At the very end of A Day in the Life comes its famous final chord. On four separate pianos, Lennon, McCartney, Ringo Starr and assistant Mal Evans all simultaneously played an E-major chord. The chord lasts for a full 40 seconds, the recording level having been increased as the vibrations faded. It is right at its end that I like it most; at the point where we hear not just the dying notes but also the more domestic sounds of the studio, the rustling of papers and the squeak of a chair; the sound of real life, finding its way in.